L.G.C. |Reviews| — Dungeon Souls

Your intrepid heroes adjust resolutions, attempt to aim, and drink pixel soup. Dungeon Souls faces the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: Dungeon Souls
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/383230/
Devel: Lamina Studios, Mike Studios
Engine: GameMaker: Studio
Price: 12.99 / CDN 13.99

Wazzat: Dungeon Souls is an action-adventure roguelike dungeon crawler which draws heavy inspiration from Nuclear Thro ne, Risk of Rain, and Overture. Explore vast procedurally generated dungeons, collect loot, and slay hordes of challenging enemies!

Mandatory Disclosure: The devs sent us keys.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

This thing start in a tiny little bit-o-screen every time it’s launched.
I have to face FK my monitor in order to sort it.
And forget about dealing with that noise in Bog Picture.

J-

The tiny screen. It’s real
Compounded by the fact that you need an xbox controller plugged in to fix that.
At least it remembers your settings

P-

If I start the game in fullscreen, it renders in 320×240 in the bottom left corner of the screen.
It reminded me of the Serpent in the Staglands.
I worked around it with the KDE Advanced Window rules by disabling fullscreen in game and forcing it through KWin.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

Remember how Owlboy did everything right?
Well this is Bizarro Owlboy… wait, that’ insulting to Bizarro.
This looks like every other hipster-pixel hot mess currently on Steam.
Hell it’s worse than most.
Even after disabling some of the text and BS effects it’s still pixel soup.
Never bothered to check if it had sound.

J-

Pedro thinks a 320×240 window at 1080 is bad, try it at UHD.
Shit gets crowded fast on the screen.
The pixel art isn’t anything to write home about
I guess there’s a soundtrack

P-

Wow, 4:3 in 16:9 screens looks like ASS.

Total-

Control

V-

I like how this game SCREAMS about needing a keyboard/gerbil in order to play in Big Picture.
Have you tried to play this with a keyboard… it’s rubbish.
Not that controlla support is better.

J-

Doesn’t support DS4 Controllers. 360 controller works
Aiming is really weird

P-

Doesn’t support the Steam controller. Logitech F310 works.
The only way to use the Steam controller is to use Steam Big Picture mode and setting it to emulate mouse/keyboard.

Total-

FUN

V-

70 plus minutes in this game and I don’t really know… what’s going on.
I might have put more time into it IF I didn’t have to break out the magnifying glass each time I launched it.
Than again I might not since there is nothing here that has not been done before, better.
Kill, die, repeat.

J-

It’s not the worst thing in the world
Running around indiscriminately murdering things with arrows or magic can be fun.
The problem becomes, sometimes there’s just too much shit going on the screen and sometimes you end up accidentally running into or triggering a trap
I’d imagine it’d be a combination of more fun and more frustrating with online multiplayer
- It’ll be a hard sell for couch
The controls aren’t fantastic either.

P-

I hate this game… for exactly the same reason I hate most.
It’s not terrible, but it’s not exactly good.
They were trying to do something along the lines of Legend of Dungeon, remember that?
It’s Nuclear Throne with a heavier dose of medieval fantasy.
This is the kind the game which, even though I usually suck at, tend to enjoy quite a lot.
I’ve sunk over 30 hours into Enter the Gungeon, 18 in Binding of Isaac, 27 in Risk of Rain.
This is the kind of genre I will excuse the bullshit hipster pixels for the sake of the mechanics. But they managed to cock that up, too!
Not only are the controls less than ideal, ensuring you will never be able to truly enjoy the mechanics as the developers themselves envisioned you would, there are mechanics and RNG bullshit actively fighting one another.
The Rogue-lite elements in this game can be summed up into perma-death and randomization. That’s it. The two most overdone and completely fucking boring elements of something which constitutes a rogue-lite.
But in order for a game with those elements to be enjoyable instead of Nope-inducing, it needs to curb the randomness. Especially when there are levels entirely randomly generated in a way that makes it almost impossible for you to progress.
In Enter the Gungeon, which is possibly the closest to this game I’ve experienced, I can reliably get to the 4th level of the dungeon. In Dungeon Souls, the only way I can even beat the first area, let alone the first boss, is an exercise in trial and error.
Everything is so random in fact, creatures will often get stuck in random bits of scenery because their pathing AI just can’t deal with it.
If the AI in your game can’t fucking deal with it, what makes you think people will?